Some manufacturers offer products to consumers with a variety of available options. A common example would be the automotive industry, which allows its customers to select among a large number of options when purchasing vehicles. In some cases, these available options may be mutually exclusive, such as engine type, but often times different available options can be mixed-and-matched based on consumer desire. Since there are costs associated with supporting any option, to provide this kind of customization, auto manufacturers typically divide their products into different levels, each having their own set of available options.
To determine which options to include in which level, the manufacturers identify groups of options that consumers could select for a product and then estimate how often each of the groups of option will be selected by the consumers. These estimates, called take rates, are usually performed manually by the manufacturers. While many manufacturers can provide a reasonably accurate estimate how often consumers will select a certain option for a product, sometimes called an option rate, figuring out how often each of these options is combined with various different options remains difficult. To further complicate matters, since for every additional available option for a product, the number of groups of options that are selectable grows, often times exponentially, the difficulty increases as the product customizability increases. To appease consumers demand for customizability, many manufacturers over support options in their product families, which adds unnecessary cost to their products when certain options go largely unselected by consumers.